Upcoming Events

Two video crowdsourcing sites — Poptent in North America and Userfarm in Europe — announced today they are merging into a new company called Vizy.

The two companies offer platforms that enable videos to be created for brands by a combined community of more than 120,000 film makers, writers, editors, and small production companies.

Using the same procedure as its predecessor companies, Vizy invites brands or agencies to submit a creative brief of what they’re looking for. Community participants then file written or video storyboard ideas for review. Vizy chooses the filmmakers to create completed videos and offers performance testing of submissions and social engagement strategies. Clients only pay for the videos they end up using. One example: BarillaFactory, which uses crowdsourced creative content to promote its sauces.

Nick Pahade, Poptent’s former CEO and Vizy’s new CEO, told VentureBeat that a company sometimes might use the service to generate hundreds of pieces of native video content, such as how-to’s, customer testimonials, and buying guides.

Userfarm CEO Bruno Pellegrini will become General Manager and European lead of the combined company, and all current employees will move to Vizy.

Why the merger?

The first reason, Pahade said, “was to solidify our ability to offer access to a truly global workforce.”

He added that the combined communities now represent “the undisputed largest community of video professionals in the world,” and the management team is the only global operations team “experienced with creating video at scale with this type of distributed creative workforce.”

Though the two companies were similar in focus, Pahade said that Poptent had “developed serious capabilities for the art of post-production and the ability to polish a video idea into a usable asset.” Userfarm, on the other hand, had simplified the experience of “interacting with their organization,” including the development of a white-label version of their platform so that brands could generate their own crowdsourced videos.

The new Vizy, he added, will offer an integrated platform with “bigger community, better technology, broader range of expertise.” It will now be able to work around the world simultaneously, Pahade said, in multiple languages and cultures.

Pahade noted that such competitors as Tongal and eYeka might have “some community overlap,” but Vizy’s ability to “enable agencies and brands in content creation and curation [differentiates] us from the competition.”

Both predecessor companies were founded in 2007. Poptent was based in Philadelphia, with an office in Orange County, Calif., and Userfarm’s headquarters were in London, with offices in Italy, France, and Spain. All offices will remain open, and London will be home base.